


Warm Up

by Ursula (lovesthesoundof)



Series: Freaks, Geeks and Warehouse Agents [1]
Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-14
Updated: 2012-09-14
Packaged: 2017-11-14 04:55:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/511545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovesthesoundof/pseuds/Ursula
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After saving Helena from the spar of the Titanic, Myka commits a shared moment of peace to memory.  (AU, 2x09)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Warm Up

It begins in Moscow.

Looking back in a year or three, you'll wonder if it began sooner.  Maybe it was in a graveyard, quiet condolences and softly impassioned confessions; maybe something was born there among the dead.  Maybe it began in a lab, nurtured by a saved life and a shared glance and a quiet plea for clemency.  Maybe you found it up in the air, a deceptively strong arm around you and a cool remark about the good old days caressing your ear.  Maybe you were meeting at gunpoint for the second time, your hand around her throat and then her so far into your space you ought to have felt threatened (but you didn't, and maybe you liked it).  Maybe at the very moment dark eyes first met yours, sized you up, found you...interesting, but somehow wanting, you began wanting in another sense - wanting those eyes to look at you differently.  Or maybe it was even further back, back when you were young, tracing your fingertips over yellowing pages, drinking in words and dreaming of other times and other places, thinking that the man (!) who wrote this book must have been a magical man indeed.  But you'll come to the same conclusion every time: that was all groundwork for what happened in Moscow.

Because what is happening in Moscow, here, now, is that she's sleeping, and you're holding her, and you think you might be just a little bit in love.

You didn't set out to go to bed with her.  In the most common usage of the phrase you still haven't - this was about body heat, not attraction, and you're not surprised she still needs you for warmth tonight.  You've seen artefact effects linger before.  Neutralisation is a tricky business at the best of times; reversing the effects of artefacts in the process is not always a given.  A crapshoot, Claudia would call it, and earn herself a bushy-eyebrowed frown.  It's even worse if you have to resort to other methods.  You've never known destroying the artefact to fail, but that can have some nasty side-effects of its own (or you'd be in the business of destruction, not containment).  Sometimes there's a built in get-out clause, sometimes cures that should work really **do** work, but in both cases it's usually an imperfect solution and tends to leave a scar.  You've got a grey streak you dye and one knuckle that aches in stormy weather.  Pete has had to get used to hearing percussion rhythms as a collection of nonsensical letters.  Leena still has moments where she'll unthinkingly obey a simple command without realising she's done it.  Truthfully, though Claudia's blessedly alive after her run-in with Godfrid's Spoon (thanks to the woman in your arms) you're still waiting for the other shoe to drop.  You daren't ask what's happened to Artie over the years.

You still don't know what's going to happen to Helena, but at least she isn't dying of hypothermia any more.  You'll take what you can get.

You remember everything.  It's your blessing and your curse.  You can look back over your life in a way that few people can, and you seldom like what you see.  Tonight you're replaying the events of the day, starting from the point when you arrived on the scene just in time to Tesla the man with the chain (Ivan, you learned, Alexander's son) and saw Helena there, a shivering ball of misery, arms wrapped tightly around a piece of wood - the spar from the _Titanic_ , you realised instantly; the same thing that killed Joe Sweetwood.  The colour was slowly coming back into her, but she was still shaking, gasping for air, her hair and skin and clothes growing slick with melt-water as the ice withdrew.  You were already running toward her when Artie set her down on the ground; the front of his shirt was dark, wet from where he'd been holding her.  You fell to your knees beside her, tore off your coat and swathed her in it, clutched her to your chest, whispered something like _I'm here, I've got you,_ maybe called her some generic pet name without thinking (you're still not sure if you said that out loud; you remember the fact of it regardless).  You told Artie she might die without someone to look after her.  He gave you the flat look he gives people when he's trying to pretend he doesn't care about something and said words to the effect of _deal with it_ , and at that point your decision was made.  You were stopping the night in Moscow, and she was staying with you.

What you remember most about that moment is the way she relaxed against you, trusting as a child, and trembled, you thought, a little less.

You half-walked, half-carried her to the nearest hotel, and your rusty but serviceable Russian plus less money than you'd expected got you up to the room you're in now.  Pete hovered along with you half the way until you sent him off in search of hot drinks, hoping his nose for food would help him find a suitable place to buy some.  (He seemed to take it as a challenge, but you had the feeling then and still do now that he appreciated the excuse to be away from Helena; you suspect her presence makes him uncomfortable and her weakness more so.)  It was just the two of you then, you and Helena.  You remember the reassuringly heavy _clunk_ of the door closing behind you.  More clearly still you remember the shuddering sigh she gave, leaning against you more heavily now that no one else could see.  Her hands and face were white with cold.  Water dripped from her hair, her clothes, on to the carpet.

Between the two of you, you stripped her down.  At first you thought you'd let her do that for herself, but it didn't take you more than the fifteen seconds spent finding towels (three, off-white, but at least not threadbare) to realise her hands were shaking too much to unfasten her jeans.  It was the wrong time to notice that she had the legs for skinny jeans, but you did anyway.  You noticed other things, too: how white she was, but for a dusting of dark hair and a scattering of freckles, and how painfully thin.  How breakable.  You wrapped her in one of the towels (too small by half, even for a tiny little thing like her), knelt to swipe the water from her calves and feet (a little purple around the edges, and you hated that) with a second as she scrubbed fiercely at her hair with the last.  At least that didn't require dexterity.

Once she was mostly dry, as dry as the pair of you could get her with those stupid little towels, you bundled her into the bed - one bed, sized comfortably for two; knowing she'd need your warmth, you'd made sure of that - and discarded the less forgiving of your clothes to join her.  She smelled like the sea.  Her skin was sticky with salt.  And Jesus, she was like ice.  You held her tightly, willing the shaking to stop, a part of you terrified that Artie had taken the spar from her too soon - but eventually you began to feel a little warmth creeping back in, and the shaking grew less violent, and the painful tension you'd been carrying since the moment you saw her on the ground began to bleed out of you.

You'd waited a long time to feel less beholden to her.

She shivered in little bursts for the rest of the evening, but not so much that you didn't dare get up and answer the door to Pete.  You threw your clothes back on haphazardly for some semblance of decency, and you know your shirt was cross-buttoned but he didn't say a word about it.  He mentioned some girl he'd managed to communicate with despite the lack of a common language, gestured to indicate she'd been attractive, and it was such a transparent attempt to fill an awkward silence that you felt awkward anyway - too awkward to protest, which you'd ordinarily have done on principle.  Hot drinks changed hands, along with a warm paper bag of various foodstuffs you'd probably have turned up your nose at on any other day, and he couldn't be out of there fast enough.  He didn't even look at Helena.  She seems to be the one beautiful woman in the world he won't gawk at - a blessing in itself, but a symptom of something else.

You wondered briefly if he'd had another vibe.

One glance at Helena, curled up in a ball beneath the sheets, was enough to decide you didn't want to know.

She ate deceptively quickly.  She didn't snatch at her food like a starving animal (Pete's favoured method after going too long without a meal), but you'd barely got half way through your portion before she finished hers.  She gave you an apologetic little smile - _must've been hungry_ , she said - and you remembered feeling every one of her ribs under your hands and gave her the rest of your meal.  You knew she was still hungry; she only protested once.  You wondered, as you wonder now, what kind of life she must have lived since escaping the Bronze Sector.  If she could get from country to country she couldn't have lacked money, but how she came by it - and what she had to go through before that - you don't like to think about.  You remember her suffering all too clearly; you don't need to imagine more of it.

You didn't talk much.  There was so much you wanted to say to her - so much you wanted to **ask** her, now that it seemed safe to do so - but it wasn't the time.  Not for any of it.  Mostly you stayed close, kept her as warm as you could, but once the bed was sufficiently warm you felt safe leaving her in it while you wrote your report.  You think she might have dozed off for a few minutes, because she turned to you apropos of nothing and remarked upon your work:

"You're sketching my likeness for the Regents, I suppose?  I do hope you have my good side."

Her eyes were a little sleepy, and her hair was an artful mess, and the smile she wore was just a little self-deprecating - she was making light of her own arrogance, which was possibly even more attractive than the arrogance itself (and certainly less irritating), and you found yourself smiling back as you said _yeah, me too_.  And then you told her you'd do everything you could to get her back into the Warehouse, and that might have been a touch too fervent because you think she might have blushed, just a little, as she thanked you.

She was still cold when you came to bed and turned out the light.  You moved to hold her; she shivered at your touch.  You caught yourself wanting to trail your fingertips down the length of her spine just to make her shiver again.

She's warm now, curled up against you.  Under the sea-salt you can smell something else, something like dry earth and butterscotch.  You wonder if it's her.

She's naked in your arms, fast asleep, and you think you might be just a little bit in love.

This is Moscow, where it all begins.  You can feel it beginning even now, though it'll be months, even years before you speak of it.  You won't even dare look right at it for the longest time, and by the time you do she'll be dying in your arms and it'll be so close, _this close_ to too late, and it'll terrify you so completely that you'll turn and run away.

(She'll follow you.  Everywhere.  Like a ghost.)

But don't think about that now.  Don't try to stretch your mind out too far into the future; there's nothing good to find.  You don't want to know that maybe you'll survive, that probably she won't.  You want to know that you'll be adventurers together, that some of the endless wonder will finally start to get through to you (because you think it could, with her), that there's a dream out there just waiting to come true.

(The thing about dreams is that they change, as all things do, at the touch of an artefact.  Especially the nightmares.  Yours will be no different.)

So don't think about what's going to happen.  Think about **now**.  Think about lying in bed with her, holding her close like she belongs to you (and a tiny part of her already does).  Etch this scene into your memory, because you won't get a chance like this again for a long, long time and you'll want it when it's gone.  You'll want her when she's gone.  And she'll be gone tomorrow, when you wake, and you'll never see her quite like this again.

There.  Now you can sleep.  You're going to need it.  In the morning they'll already have taken her away from you, and from there on it'll be uphill all the way.  This woman will be the fight of your life - sometimes for her, sometimes with her, but always her.

Remember Moscow, Myka, when it gets too much to bear.  Remember Moscow, holding her as she sleeps, your first shared moment of peace.

Fight hard enough and it won't be your last.


End file.
